Egon Brunswik

Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa (18 March 1903, Budapest – 7 July 1955, Berkeley, California) was a psychologist who is known for his theory of probabilisitic functionalism and his proposition that representative design is essential in psychological research.

Brunswik was born in Budapest, Hungary, He graduated from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921, after studying mathematics, science, classics, and history.

Brunswik met Edward C. Tolman in Vienna during 1933, and in 1935–1936 received a Rockefeller fellowship that enabled him to visit the University of California.

On June 6, 1938, in New York City Brunswik married Else Frenkel-Brunswik (also a former assistant in Buhler's institute), who became well known as a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist and investigator of the authoritarian personality.

Brunswik's cast of mind compelled him to fit together with precision his conceptual framework, his methodology, and his views of the history of psychology.

According to Tolman "Brunswik's untimely death on 7 July 1955, at the age of 52, came just as his doctrines of functionalistic achievement, representative design and ecological validity had begun to arouse widespread attention both in this country and abroad.

[5] Brunswik's probabilism is attracting increasing attention in the fields of learning,[6] thinking,[7] decision processes,[8] perception,[9] communication [10] and the study of curiosity.

[13] A specific, practical method for the application for Brunswik's models have been documented in the book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard.